Teacher Development and Training Programs: Priorities for Education Policies in Africa
For more than three years now, the GPE KIX Continental Symposium has established itself as a not-to-be-missed event for education stakeholders in Africa, bringing together researchers, experts, decision-makers and practitioners from governments, international organizations, civil society and academia. Its importance lies in its ability and ambition to highlight, in a collaborative and constructive way, the complex challenges affecting the continent's education systems, while identifying concrete ways to overcome them.
Key themes addressed by key education stakeholders
Held from November 20 to 22, 2024, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the third GPE KIX Continental Symposium was held around the theme "Building Resilient Systems for Increased Access to Inclusive, Quality and Relevant Education in Africa." As in the first two editions, the event developed five specific themes. These consist of equitable access to education, teacher development, early childhood education, data-driven management, and training and leadership programs.
Although the theme of equitable access to education attracted the largest number of papers (44 out of 94), two other themes were the main focus of debate during two parallel sessions attended by decision-makers and education practitioners from countries belonging to GPE KIX's Africa 21 and Africa 19 regional hubs. These are themes related to teacher development and curricula. During the sessions I was lucky enough to attend, these two themes gave rise to captivating and thought-provoking discussions. These discussions showed the extent to which teacher training and training programs are intertwined in the design and implementation of education policies (Bouvier, 1999: Iucu, 2006).
Education policy priorities raised by the symposium
The participants in the two sessions mentioned above, including the main educational designers in their countries (General Secretaries, Technical Advisors, Pedagogical Advisors, Pedagogical Inspectors), raised in particular the question of training in the teaching of national languages, given the linguistic diversity and popular perceptions of these languages compared with official languages. The question of teacher training in educational technologies, and more specifically in artificial intelligence, was also raised. The conference highlighted the dilemma facing African education systems: on the one hand, the global challenges posed by technological advances and the training of the universal individual to which they are called; and on the other, the local challenges posed by the socio-technical, pedagogical and economic deficits to which they must respond. In addition, the capacity-building needs of teachers to promote educational inclusion and cope with emergency situations were discussed. These last two topics were the subject of particularly captivating debates, given that in Africa, one child in ten is disabled and more than 47 million children are currently displaced due to conflict.
These issues are not only confined to teacher training, but they also affect training programs, whose adaptability and effectiveness participants emphasized as crucial issues. However, program reform that takes into account the issues outlined above is tantamount to embodying a range of issues with sometimes differing objectives, to the point where an unstructured approach risks not only raising new questions, but also further weakening these programs by making them unstable, unsuitable or vulnerable to external pressures (Dupriez, 2002). So what kind of curriculum revisions are needed to address these issues while putting teachers at the heart of the process?
Beyond the symposium, continuing to reflect on teachers and programs
If we consider the issues raised by politicians and education practitioners at this latest symposium, teacher training and curricula require particularly close attention.
Focusing educational policy on these issues can serve as a focal point for the various GPE KIX challenges. For starters, it allows us to see the results of previous symposia in terms of implementing lessons learned and opening up innovative perspectives on teacher capacity-building, inclusive education and the resilience of education systems. At the same time, it highlights GPE KIX's strategic priorities, which include improving equity and inclusion, quality learning, sustainability of education systems, innovation and research, and data management systems. At the same time, this reflexive perspective offers ways of tackling the specific educational challenges facing the countries in the Africa 21 and Africa 19 regional hubs of GPE KIX, such as the digital divide, poverty and inequality, conflict management and migratory flows, and the schooling of refugees and displaced children and young people, while focusing attention on global challenges such as artificial intelligence, the labour market and 21st century skills.
By integrating these reflections, educational policies in Africa could benefit more efficiently from the proposals developed collaboratively by the main players in educational reform. Considering these proposals in political terms will also provide avenues for decision-making and action that will make teachers and programs the levers of educational transformation in Africa.
